March 09, 2010

We know that the story is a construct meant to elicit a response and then become a cathartic release when the good guys win. We know that it is only gesturally referential to ‘the real world’ or ‘a logical world’ and that, instead, it is simply put together in order for us to experience spectacle, regardless of whether or not it hold together ‘as narrative’. T:ROTF shows that it doesn’t matter a whit whether narrative coheres, because we are now comfortable with the idea that no narrative actually coheres. We just try and make them do so.

I've read this article every year since 1995. Every year an action movie pushes the boundaries of style over substances, and every year film students fall over themselves to say this is a good thing.

I'd like a Chrome extension that redirects every article similar to the above to Armond White's Transporter 3, which is the last word on the topic as far as I am concerned. ("NOTHING IN CINEMA this week is more important than Transporter 3. It’s been a long time since a new movie has been so spiritually and aesthetically exhilarating." - sound familiar?)

Heh - fair point. I was deliberately being a bit exaggerative because I was genuinely surprised at how giddy I was after seeing the film. It's not so much that I enjoyed the film itself - it was the sheer unabashed ridiculousness of the movie.

That review of Transporter 3 sounds like a celebration of aestheticism. Transformers wasn't particularly exhilarating. It was comforting and predictable; none of that seemed to matter particularly. I just thought it was an interesting cultural moment, because millions of people felt happy to watch an incoherent, disconnected narrative because the lynchpins of the story - the things that made it stick in place - were all cliches and tropes.

I don't think this is a good think, really. Or at least: it's not if all films were like this. But God - I'd take a hundred Transformers films rather than one more Avatar.

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